Editing topics and comments gets unavailable after some time

It probably makes sense to remove the limitation and make editing topics and comments available regardless of how much time has passed since its posting.

Adding new information to existing posts helps to make information less fragmented and to keep all the related information in one place thus simplifying searching and reading the relevant info.

Ability to edit is a fundamental advantage of forums over mailing lists.

Discourse engine almost certainly has a setting for this, so changing this should be a matter of (un)checking a checkbox or so.

I feel it best to leave the locking in place, except for the initial post if an exemption for that can be made. Over time, people may go edit their posts and not leave the old information in place. Therefore making the conversation more disjointed to read rather than easier. However, the initial post is the exception since you may want to update that after following conversation to reflect what is wanted/being discussed more clearly to people just jumping in.

This is not the case with Discourse engine since change history for any message is always available to view.

Keeping an eye on this (as I agree with MT … that we should review things as new information becomes available). Can you bug us again if it becomes a problem for particular threads.

For example, I would like to update my comment related to display: flow-root as the feature gets implemented in more and more browsers. For now, I’m able to do this (and already used this ability several times), but I suppose editing will soon be automatically disabled for that comment as it was with all previous comments (e. g. two months or so after posting the comment).

I dont believe anyone is notified when comments are edited–even people who are subscribed for updates, at least by default anyway. Is the goal just to update your comments for new visitors of the thread?

When comments are edited, the thread is pushed back to the top. This serves as a notification for me, as I keep the tab pinned in my browser.

The goal is to prevent information fragmentation.

How would allowing people to edit comments two years back prevent information fragmentation? Every post has a date associated with it and users can clearly see that a post is old by considering when it was written. By its very nature, topics and information on here will get stale. There is nothing that would prevent this unless everybody who ever wrote any post in the past went back and updated their topic and all commenters adjusted their comments on it, which is highly impractical.

To prevent info fragmentation, linking to an old post is always an option.

Also, simply because the history is available to view doesn’t mean the context is there nor that people will actually use that functionality. Which could lead people to be confused reading over a conversation once edited after-the-fact. Especially something edited weeks/months after initial posting.